Links I’d Like To…

The past is hardly as austere as we would like to imagine it to be. In a wonderfully revealing photo set, Chris Wild’s Retronaut reveals the profound silly of the past. His goal, according to Hyperallergic, is to:

to unearth pictures that seem not to belong to the time when they were created, that dissolve away the years like tarnish on a ring, that take our collective map of the past and tear tiny holes in it, holes through which we glimpse the real past lying underneath our map.

Sarah Kessler, in defiance of all those I-unplugged-for-a-month-look-at-me features, tackles her reliance on technology by cramming even more technology into her life. How many mindfulness apps can you download before you’re, well, mindless?

The new book Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them comes out this week. In the intro by the miraculous Cheryl Strayed, she explains our undying fascination with the drawings on our flesh:

“As long as I live I’ll never tired of people-watching on city buses and park benches. In small-town cafes and crowded elevators. At concerts and swimming pools. To people-watch is to glimpse the mysterious and the banal, the public face and the private gesture, the strangest other and the most familiar self. It’s to wonder how and why and what and who and hardly ever find out.”

Artist Ed Templeton creates an amazing piece of art and then proceeds to skateboard all over it.